Polanyi's double movement and the making of the ‘knowledge economy'

In this chapter, we want to re-evaluate the heuristic role of Polanyi’s double movement by suggesting an alternative reading that could answer several criticisms that have been levelled against it. Moreover, we believe that this reading can give us greater insight into both the nature of the current crisis and its failure to unravel the neoliberal consensus.1 According to our reading, since the Speenhamland measures introduced in 1795 in Britain, faulty welfarist solutions have had the ability to undermine the political force of countermovements calling for protective measures while helping pro-market coalitions to periodically regenerate themselves. For us, this means that the future resolution of the current crisis is likely to restart a new cycle in what looks uncannily like the “Groundhog Day” of modernity. As a result, we should expect not only the deepening of previous drives to commodify land, labour and money, but also a full-blown attempt at commodifying novel fields of activity and social resources. Knowledge is, in the context of the information age, the most likely candidate to be turned into another (fourth) fictitious commodity. This, we shall argue, explains the tensions arising in those sectors engaged in the managerial and intellectual activities which in the last four decades have been the target of New Public Management (NPM).